"What happens when the AI companies (inevitably) encounter spam and attempts at SEO/GEO manipulation in the markdown files targeted to bots? What happens when the .md files no longer provide an equivalent experience to what users are seeing? What happens if they continue crawling those pages but actually toss them out before using the content to form a response? ...And we keep conflating "bot crawling activity" with "the bots are using/liking my markdown content?" How will we know if they're actually using the .md files or not?"
"As a reminder, a Markdown is a lightweight markup language used to create and edit technical documents using plain text and special characters for formatting. Markdown files are converted into HTML by a Markdown parser, which allows browsers to display the content to readers."
"The web's messy on its own; these services all have to filter out things that don't work. Of course they'll also filter out things (and sites) that are purposely abusive. Even basic SEO tool metrics like DA do that."
Markdown is a lightweight markup language that uses plain text and special characters for formatting and is converted to HTML by a parser so browsers can display content. AI and search services face risks from spam and SEO/GEO manipulation embedded in Markdown files targeted at bots. Concerns include .md files not matching the user-visible experience, crawling without using content to form responses, and conflating crawl activity with actual content usage. The web environment is messy, requiring services to filter non-working and abusive sites; such filtering can reduce reliance on raw .md content while increasing crawl load and error detection.
Read at Search Engine Roundtable
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